Moral Theory and the Consequentialism/Non-Consequentialism Distinction

Convenor: Christian Seidel

Participants

• Annette Dufner (Bonn University/Germany), The Partial Convergence Between Kantianism and Sidgwick’s Utilitarianism
• Vuko Andrić (Bayreuth University/Germany), A Defence of the Consequentialism/Non-Consequentialism Distinction
• Paul Hurley (Claremont McKenna College/USA), Consequentializing: Consequentialism’s Strongest Case, or Its Last Gasp?
• Thomas Schmidt (Humboldt University Berlin/Germany), The Structural Appeal of Consequentialism (and How to Resist It)
• Tim Henning (Stuttgart University/Germany), The Mere Addition Paradox, Morality De Re, and Consequentialism
• Jan Gertken (Humboldt University Berlin/Germany), Consequentialism and Directed Obligations [cancelled]
  

Further Information

Axiological Implications of New Developments in Welfare Science

Convenors: Adam Shriver & Lisa Forsberg

Participants:

• Adam Shriver (Oxford University/UK)
• Lisa Forsberg (Oxford University/UK) & Anthony Skelton (University of Western Ontario/USA)

Further Information

The Moral Implications of Driverless Cars

Convenor: Christoph Schmidt-Petri

Participants:

• Sven Nyholm (Eindhoven University of Technology/Netherlands), The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars and the Traditional Moral Theories
• Dieter Birnbacher (Düsseldorf University/Germany), Driverless Cars: How Much Equality?
  
• Anders Sandberg (Oxford University/UK),  Moral Proxies on the Road: Value Alignment and the Freedom to Hold Ethical Views
• Armin Grunwald (Karlsruhe Institut of Technology/Germany), The Role of Ethics in the German Public Debate on Self-Driving Cars

Further Information

Utility, Nudges and Behavioral Insights: New Technologies to Improve Peoples’ Behaviour

Convenor: Malik Bozzo-Rey

Participants:

• Malik Bozzo-Rey (Lille University/France), Nudges, Behavioral Sciences and Utility: Some Normative Challenges
• Anne Brunon-Ernst (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas/France), Framing Consent
• Viktor Ivankovic (Central European University/Hungary), Nudging, Transparency, and Watchfulness

Further Information

Hare’s Utilitarianism, Varner’s Animals

Convenor: Gary Comstock

Participants:

• Gary Comstock (North Carolina State University/USA)
• Susana Monso (University of Graz/Austria)
• Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado Boulder/USA)
• Adam Shriver (University of Oxford/UK)
• Gary Varner (Texas A&M University/USA)

Further Information

Plant Ethics and Consequentialism

Convenor: Gianfranco Pellegrino

Participants:

• Gianfranco Pellegrino (Luiss Guido Carli/Italy)
• Marcello Di Paola (Luiss Guido Carli/Italy)
• Tatjana Visak (Goethe University Frankfurt/Germany)

Further Information

Sidgwick and the methods of ethics [sic]

Convenors: Dorothee Bleisch & Michael W. Schmidt

Participants:

• David O. Brink (University of California, San Diego/USA)
• Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (University of Łódź/Poland)
• Tyler Paytas (Australian Catholic University/Australia)
• Michael W. Schmidt (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/Germany)

Further Information

Classical Utilitarianism and Free Speech

Convenor: Peter Niesen

Participants:

• Frauke Höntzsch (Augsburg University/Germany), Hate Speech as a Restriction on Liberty. J. St. Mill's Harm Principle and the Limits of Free Speech
• Anthony Julius (University College London/UK), Who Was the Greater Champion of Literature, Bentham or Mill?
• Filimon Peonidis (University of Thessaloniki/Greece), James Mill's Theory of Free Speech: A Philosophical Assessment

Further Information

Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity

Convenor: Philip Schofield/Piero Tarantino

Participants:

• Malik Bozzo-Rey (Université Catholique de Lille/France), Norms and Obligations in Bentham’s Theory of Law
• Emmanuelle De Champs (Université de Cergy-Pontoise/France), The Historical Sources of Bentham’s Theory of Real and Fictitious Entities
• Anne Brunon-Ernst (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas/France), A Special Case of Normativity: Indirect Legislation
• Gianfranco Pellegrino (LUISS Guido Carli/Italy), Bentham’s View of Fictitious Entities and the Metaethical Framework of Contemporary Fictionalism
• Philip Schofield (University College London/UK), The Place of Logic and Language in the Future Direction of Bentham Studies

Further Information

Jeremy Bentham’s Art and Science of Legislation

Convenor: Angela Marciniak

Participants:

• Angela Marciniak (Gießen University/Germany), "Utility is not a Law": Jeremy Bentham’s Political Political Theory
• Michael Quinn (University College London/UK), “In the Banking Business, Every Thing is out of its Name”: Bentham on the Magic of Papermoney and the Interests of the Bankers
• Chris Riley (University College London/UK), The Hermit and the Boa Constrictor: Jeremy Bentham, Lord Brougham, and the Accessibility of Justice

Further Information

On Postema’s Two Books on Bentham’s Legal Philosophy

Convenor: Xiaobo Zhai

Participants:

• Francesco Ferraro (University of Milan/Italy), Constitutional Rights: An Attempt at a Benthamic Understanding
• Michihiro Kaino (Doshisha University/Japan), Bentham’s Theories of the Rule of Law and the Universal Interest
• Michael Lobban (London School of Economics/UK), Postema and the Common Law Tradition
• Simon Palmer (Leuphana University, Germany and University College London/UK), Postema on Bentham on Meaning
• Dan Priel (Osgoode Hall Law School/Canada), Bentham’s Utilitarianism and his Jurisprudence
• Xiaobo Zhai (University of Macau/China), Bentham and Postema on the Rule of Law
• Gerald Postema (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/USA), Replies

Further Information

Effective Altruism: Normative Questions

Convenor: Stefan Riedener

Participants:

• Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen/Netherlands), Should Effective Altruists be Egalitarians?
• Samuel Hughes (University of Cambridge/UK), Effective Altruism and the Ethics of Apocalypse
• Teruji Thomas (University of Oxford/UK), Must Tiny Chances Count?
• Stefan Riedener (University of Zurich/Switzerland), Effective Altruism under Moral Uncertainty

Further Information

Moral Theory and the Consequentialism/Non-Consequentialism Distinction

Convenor: Christian Seidel

Consequentialism is a focal point of discussion and a driving force  behind developments in normative ethics, ever since Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick articulated (what is today believed to be) its most prominent version, classical utilitarianism. Indeed, major parts of the history of modern moral philosophy from then on - the works of Moore, Ross, Anscombe, Foot, Rawls, Williams, Nozick, Hare, Nagel, Scheffler, Parfit etc. - can be understood in terms of fierce criticism and illuminating defenses of consequentialist moral theories. Until today, proponents of rival ethical perspectives (deontology, contractualism or virtue ethics) continue to motivate and elaborate their accounts by contrasting them with consequentialism.

But in recent years, consequentialism has transformed. Some consequentialists have appealed to agent-relative axiologies (and corresponding agent-relative rankings) in order to model agent-centeredness within a consequentialist framework. This way, they claimed, just any moral theory - in particular those with  agent-centered characteristics which were typically believed to be the hallmark of non-consequentialism - can be couched in consequentialist terms such that both the theory and its  consequentialist counterpart yield exactly the same deontic verdicts. This maneuver, known as "consequentializing", allowed to conceptualize consequentialism at a more abstract level. At the  same time, consequentialists have reformulated their accounts in terms of (a teleological conception of) reasons rather than value or goodness - in keeping with the overarching paradigm in moral

philosophy to frame issues in terms of reasons. Although it would be premature to speak of consequentialism’s conceptual emancipation from value, one might indeed wonder whether there remains any independent role for those concepts that were once essential to (if not defining of) consequentialism - value or goodness.

The emergence of new wave consequentialism raises a number of questions for moral theorizing: Do we have to reconsider our understanding of how to classify moral theories as consequentialist vs. non-consequentialist? What good is a very broad, abstract understanding of consequentialism? Does the class of non-consequentialist moral theories become empty? Is "consequentialism vs. non-consequentialism" still a useful distinction? Or are we really after something different - and if so, how to capture it conceptually? What is the primary concept or the major distinction in terms of which we should classify moral theories - "consequences", "value", "reasons"?

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Axiological implications of new developments in welfare science

Convenors: Adam Shriver & Lisa Forsberg

Utilitarian decision-making procedures depend, at bottom, upon judgments about the effect of one’s actions on the general welfare. As welfare science continues to evolve and to develop innovative methods for assessing the mental states of nonhuman animals, we gain new evidence for the sentience (or lack thereof) of members of different species, which is potentially extremely important information for utilitarian decisions about which social reforms to prioritize. At a general level, understanding animal welfare has implications for how utilitarians should weigh the welfare of animals in relation to human well-being. And with more fine-grained approaches evaluating cost-benefit trade-offs such as those seen in the effective altruism movement, answering questions about sentience in difference species has important implications for whether animal advocacy campaigns should be targeting reforms related to mammals, birds, or fish in the food system. Moreover, research on nonhuman animals also provides additional insights into humans’ positive and negative mental states, which could potentially change how we assess human welfare. These and other developments in the science of well-being place pressure on traditional methods for conducting research into the nature of well-being. As such, there is a need to provide a systematic methodology for the incorporation of science into the philosophical study of well-being. In this session, we examine recent innovations in welfare science and examine how these innovations inform conceptions of human and nonhuman welfare and the methodology behind their development.

Adam Shriver will argue that recent discoveries suggest that humans do not suffer in qualitatively distinct ways from other mammals.
Lisa Forsberg and Anthony Skelton discuss how discoveries in the science of well-being might impact in various ways the methodological presuppositions of philosophical research into the nature of welfare.

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The Moral Implications of Driverless Cars

Convenor: Christoph Schmidt-Petri

Driverless cars raise many technical challenges, but the moral issues seem to be just as hard to address. The default of our current system of attributing responsibility in traffic relies on a (relatively) strict adherence to the traffic rules, a focus on the person who is driving, and the implicit acknowledgement that accidents, when they do occur, are unregulated. Drivers are morally allowed to panic, to swerve egoistically, thus potentially injuring their passengers or pedestrians. 

Driverless cars will take over some of the jobs and hence some of the responsbilities of the driver. Will we ever manage to build cars that we can trust on the road? Will they be able to 'understand' human drivers' idiosyncracies? How complete are our actual traffic regulations, and would autonomous cars simply have to stop when signals conflict, in our non-ideal world? And who should decide, and on what basis, how the automated processes that regulate accidents should be programmed? Is it acceptable to programme the car so that it protects its driver only, rather than its passengers or pedestrians? These are some of the questions we will address in this panel.   

This is a short panel in which the four short presentations will be held at the beginning and an overall discussion will follow.

Sven Nyholm will discuss some difficulties in applying the traditional moral theories (utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics) to the issue of how self-driving cars should be programmed to crash in accident-scenarios, with a special focus on utilitarianism. He will relate this issue to the topic of who the relevant moral agents are (or who the relevant moral agent is) when it comes to the ethics of self-driving cars.

Dieter Birnbacher will raise the question of how much equality is necessary and/or desirable in setting up a system of automatised traffic, in analogy to the question what level of safety should be targeted by such a system. The question will be highlighted on three levels: nations, producers, and individual users.

Anders Sandberg will focus on moral responsibility. Autonomous cars are not (at least for the foreseeable future) autonomous in the sense that give them moral responsibility, and are neither moral patients that need to be protected. Instead they will likely be moral proxies, implementing actions or ethical schemas of other people. The fundamental problems are (1) aligning the behavior with the intended ethics, and (2) whether ethics expressed through inspectable code and objective engineering will remain societally as freely choosable as ethics in human minds.

Armin Grunwald, member of the recent ethics commission on autonomous driving established by the federal ministry of transportation in Germany, will briefly sketch the raise of the public debate on autonomous driving in Germany, in particular the role of ethical dilemmas. Then he will introduce the mandate and present main messages of the ethics commission, followed by some final reflections.

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Utility, Nudges and Behavioral Insights: New Technologies to Improve Peoples’ Behaviour

Convenor: Malik Bozzo-Rey

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have largely contributed to popularize the use of the word 'nudges' and have advocated the use of behavioral insights to develop public policies and build regulatory tools and technologies to influence people’s behaviors. They justify nudges and libertarian paternalism (‘soft’ interference with people’s decision making process) by claiming they improve individuals’ well-being ‘so they could be better-off, as judged by themselves’.
Yet neither Sunstein nor Thaler refers to or seems to be committed to any form of utilitarianism, as such. This panel proposes to study theoretically and through practical cases the links between utility and behavioral sciences as well as the way in which these new technologies can impact the functioning of our democracies.

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Hare’s Utilitarianism, Varner’s Animals

Convenor: Gary Comstock

Gary Varner’s book Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two-Level Utilitarianism (Oxford University Press, 2012) reconstructs and extends the two-level utilitarianism of R.M. Hare (1919-2002). Varner argues for the significance (at least at the “intuitive level” of utilitarian moral thinking) of the concept of personhood, and for recognizing some animals as falling into a related category of “near-persons.” Varner also describes in detail the nature of various categories of “intuitive level system” (ILS) rules, which include laws, codes of professional ethics, “common morality,” and “personal morality.” Varner also describes how two-level utilitarians would work toward improving animal welfare across time by advocating for changes in the various types of ILS rules. He argues that, as background technological, ecological, economic, and other conditions change, a community of moral agents committed to the over-arching goal of maximizing aggregate happiness would advocate for changes in the various types of ILS rules.

The proposed panel will critically assess Varner’s framework for re-assessing ILS rules in utilitarian terms as new technologies emerge, and Varner’s defense of the legitimacy of conceiving of personhood in terms of biographical consciousness.

Gary Comstock will chair the panel and argue for recognition of an additional category of “far-persons.”
Susana Monsó will argue that there are types of harm that we inflict upon animals that are not captured by utilitarianism, such as commodification or violations of dignity.
Alastair Norcross  will explore the significance of the distinction between self-consciousness and mere sentience.
Adam Shriver  will examine the empirical evidence and conceptual distinctions that underlie Varner's account of personhood and near-personhood.
Gary Varner will respond.

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Plant Ethics and Consequentialism

Convenor: Gianfranco Pellegrino

The ethics of plants focuses on the value of plants, the duties we may have towards and regarding plants, and the ways in which we should relate to plants in different contexts. As such, it may stimulate discussion within and about consequentialism, including what kind of consequences matter to plants if any, and what consequences matter when relating to plants. For some, a consequentialist approach to environmental ethics, and plant ethics in particular, is generally the fittest. In his work on environmental ethics, for example, Robin Attfield proposed a biocentric version of consequentialism that also applies to plants. For others, consequentialism is unfit to provide an approach to plant ethics as it may require difficult, or counterintuitive, trade-offs – for instance between human or animal lives on the one hand and vegetal lives on the other. Some consequentialists even consider plants not to be welfare subjects – unlike human and non-human animals.

The panel hosts a discussion on the role of consequentialism for plant ethics and of plant ethics for consequentialism. It includes three panellists: Marcello Di Paola considers the goodness of relating to plants as objects of a practice and explains why consequentialism may all too easily miss it. This should be avoided in view of both theoretical completeness and better plants-related policy in various important sustainability domains, including agriculture and urban design. Gianfranco Pellegrino develops a view on the intrinsic value of plants: borrowing on remarks by Ronald Dworkin, Gerald J. Cohen, J. Brennan and A. Hamlin, Pellegrino claims that plants can have historical and particular value, as specific items and specimens. He discusses also the differences and similarities between natural items and pieces of art. On the basis of this, he puts forward a consequentialist objective value theory for plants. Tatjana Višak takes a welfarist-consequentialist perspective, according to which plants are directly morally considerable, if and only if they are welfare subjects. She argues that plants are no welfare subjects. Her argument, unlike others, does not presuppose the truth of any particular account of welfare.

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Sidgwick and the methods of ethics [sic]

Convenors: Dorothee Bleisch & Michael W. Schmidt

Few books in the history of modern philosophy have been as enthusiastically praised as Henry Sidgwick´s The Methods of Ethics. Thus, for instance Charlie Broad famously said that The Methods seemed to him “the best treatise on moral theory that has ever been written” (Five Types of Ethical Theory, 1930: 143), and Derek Parfit claimed it to “contain the largest number of true and important claims” (On What Matters, 2011: xxxiii) of any book in ethics. Notwithstanding this praise, Sidgwick`s Methods has long been unduly neglected in moral philosophy. Thus, only little attention has been paid to it right after Sidgwick´s death in 1900. This situation has changed only recently.

Since we agree with Roger Crisp that “The Methods is a philosophical gold mine, and [that] we are only at the beginning of uncovering its treasures” (The Cosmos of Duty, 2015: x), the panel “Sidgwick and the methods of ethics” will be dedicated to Sidgwick´s methods of ethics as well as more generally Sidgwick’s methods in The Methods of Ethics. Put differently, our panel will deal with questions on Sidgwick´s methods in The Methods of Ethics as well as with more specific questions on The Methods of Ethics.

Thus, Tyler Paytas will raise in his talk “The Cosmos of Reasons: Sidgwickian Ethics and Non-Moral Consequentialism” the general question of how Sidgwickian ethics should be understood. Tyler will argue that Sidgwickian ethics is best understood as supporting Non-Moral Consequentialism (NMC), i.e. a form of consequentialism which says that we always have decisive reason to do whatever would be impartially best (NMC is a normative ethical theory insofar as it provides systematic and uniform criteria for determining what an agent has most practical reason to do in a given context, but does not make reference to distinctively moral properties or concepts). Moreover, Tyler will argue that viewing consequentialism in this light is useful for appreciating its distinctiveness and theoretical merits.

Michael Schmidt will argue against the claim that it is trivial to state that Sidgwick used the method of wide reflective equilibrium. This claim is based on what could be called the Triviality Charge, which is pressed against the method of wide reflective equilibrium by Peter Singer. According to this charge, there is no alternative to using the method if it is interpreted as involving all relevant philosophical background arguments. This wide interpretation of the method then becomes so wide that it already includes all other rival methods. The main argument Schmidt presents against the Triviality Charge is that although the method of wide reflective equilibrium is compatible with coherentism (as a form of weak foundationalism) as well as moderate foundationalism, it is not compatible with strong foundationalism. Hence, the claim that a philosopher uses the method of wide reflective equilibrium is informative. In particular, this is true with regard to Sidgwick.

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, in her talk on “Sidgwick and three accounts of pleasure”,  will look at three different interpretations of Sidgwick´s account of pleasure, namely pleasure as (i) something that has a specific „feeling tone”, as (ii) something that you desire qua feeling at the moment of experiencing it or as (iii) something that you apprehend as worthy of your desire. By weighing the pros and cons of each of these interpretations, de Lazari-Radek will discuss which account is the most appealing.

Finally, David O. Brink will present some thoughts from his forthcoming article “Three Dualisms: Sidgwick, Green, and Bradley”. In this article, Brink critically engages with Sidgwick´s dualism of practical reason, i.e. Sidgwick´s claim that there is a conflict between two of his methods of ethics, namely egoism and utilitarianism. He will go on to discuss the prospects of British idealism for overcoming Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason.

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Classical Utilitarianism and Free Speech

Convenor: Peter Niesen

Although the ‚Classical‘ Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill are universally venerated as champions of free speech, their positions are often caricatured and the nuances in and between their views are largely underexplored. They are most often portrayed as knee-jerk oppenents of the restriction and regulation of speech. But topics such as censorship of the arts, the protection of factual untruths, or the prosecution of what we now call „hate speech“ demand a more complex discussion. Especially with regard to Bentham’s and in John Stuart Mill’s account, the provision of a public infrastructure of speech allowing moral and political development is often downplayed, and the adequacy of liberal responses to threats to creative writers’ freedom of expression is rarely discussed. This panel assembles some contributions towards a re-evaluation.

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Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity

Convenor: Philip Schofield/Piero Tarantino

An unrecognized and unexplored development in the history of thought is the fictionalist account of the normative character of standards of behaviour, moral values and legal rules provided by Jeremy Bentham. With a view to filling this gap, Piero Tarantino’s research monograph Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity (Routledge 2018) offers a comprehensive investigation into Bentham’s theory of real and fictitious entities, and – in particular – examines its application to the fields of morality and law.

By focusing on the concept of obligation, this book explores Bentham’s fictionalism, and aims to identify the specific features of ethical fictitious entities. The book is divided into two parts: the first examines the ontological and epistemological foundations of Bentham’s distinction between real and fictitious entities; the second part addresses the normative and motivational aspects of moral and legal notions. This work reveals the centrality of the following issues to Bentham’s legal reform: logic, language, physics, metaphysics, metaethics, axiology, moral psychology and the structure of practical reasoning with reference to the law.

This panel will serve to draw attention to the normative aspects and implications of Bentham’s theory of real and fictitious entities from an interdisciplinary point of view. It will be an occasion that brings together leading Bentham scholars who are specialists in different fields (philosophy, law, history, political science and English studies): Bozzo-Rey, Brunon-Ernst, De Champs, Pellegrino and Schofield. The panel debate will be of interest not only to those studying Bentham’s thought, but also to those wishing to understand the historical roots of the contemporary 'normative question' as an investigation into the action-guiding claim of the practical domain.

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Jeremy Bentham’s Art and Science of Legislation

Convenor: Angela Marciniak

Since the monumental task of creating a critical edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham began, scholars from a broad range of disciplines have repeatedly returned to his writings, for varied reasons and with varied goals. Given the extraordinary range of Bentham’s writings, it is unsurprising that scholars have tended to focus exclusively on the particular corner of his corpus that they consider relevant for their own discipline, and to analyse that corner as if Bentham should have shared the presuppositions of that discipline. Such an approach risks overlooking complexity, and even more the coherence, of Bentham’s project, and the way in which his generic analysis of the levers available, in any given context, to individuals and government, in pursuing and defending particular interests and the general interest respectively, constitutes an analytical method applicable to almost every field of human activity. The papers in this panel discuss different problems from different perspectives (political theory, legal history, political economy), but are united by the assertion that isolating elements of Bentham’s thought, and severing their connection with the generic nature of his approach, is likely to produce misunderstandings and misinterpretations (as has arguably been the case in all three fields). The panel will aim to illustrate the extent to which an inter- or cross-disciplinary perspective can shed new light on Bentham’s thought. The papers all present Bentham not as a lawyer, or a philosopher, or an economist, but as a theorist of public policy, or, in Bentham’s terms, a theorist of the art and science of legislation.

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On Postema’s Two Books on Bentham’s Legal Philosophy

Convenor: Xiaobo Zhai

Gerald Postema will publish two books in 2018. The first is Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Second Edition with Postscript. The second is Utility, Publicity, and Law: Bentham’s Moral and Legal Philosophy. This panel will focus on these two books, and consist of seven speakers. The preliminary plan is the following:

(9.00H-9.45H)

Xiaobo Zhai: Introduction.

Gerald Postema: Summary of Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Second Edition with Postscript and of Utility, Publicity, and Law: Bentham’s Moral and Legal Philosophy.

Questions.

(9.45H-10.30H)
Francesco Ferraro: Constitutional Rights: An Attempt at a Benthamic Understanding. Focuses on Ch. 11 of Utility, Publicity, and Law (UPL), and argues that Postema’s account of the importance of constitutional rights falls outside of Bentham’s utilitarian framework, and that the importance of those rights could be explained in more Benthamic terms.

(11.00H-11.45H)
Michihiro Kaino: Bentham’s Theories of the Rule of law and the Universal Interest. Focuses on ‘The Soul of Justice: Bentham on Publicity, Law and the Rule of Law’（ch. 13）and ‘Interests: Universal and Particular’（ch. 6） of UPL, and argues that Postema’s interpretation helps put Bentham’s theory of law in the English tradition of the rule of law, and that Bentham was a precursor of modern theories of deliberative democracy.

(11.45H-12.30H)
Michael Lobban: Postema and the Common Law Tradition. Looks at how Postema's understanding of the common law has modified since 1986, and considers what effect Postema's deeper researches on the common law may have on his reading of Bentham, and on issues of adjudication. 

(14.00H-14.45H)
Simon Palmer: Postema on Bentham on Meaning: Traceability, Fidelity, and Normativity. Argues that Postema's interpretation of Bentham's views on language, mind, and world, yields a significant advantage over rival accounts of said views, given Bentham’s ambitions for his overall project.

(14.45H-15.30H)
Danny Priel: Bentham’s Utilitarianism and his Jurisprudence. Argues that Bentham is best understood as advancing utilitarianism as a public philosophy, and that, according to Bentham, we should think of law as a mechanism for generating normative guidelines for greater happiness. 

(16.00H-16.45H)
Xiaobo Zhai: Bentham and Postema on the Rule of Law
In a series of recent papers, Postema has developed a theory of the rule of law, focusing on the fidelity to law or the conditions of its realization, instead of legality. This paper will compare Bentham and Postema’s theories of the rule of law, show and explain the similarities and differences between them.

Gerald Postema: will give comments on the above presentations.

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Effective Altruism: Normative Questions

Convenor: Stefan Riedener

(09.00H-09.45H)

Andreas T. Schmidt: “Should Effective Altruists be Egalitarians?” 

A recurring criticism of effective altruism it that it focuses too much on individual action and effective giving and thereby neglects systemic socioeconomic causes of human suffering. One such cause might be economic inequality, both within countries and globally. Recently, effective altruists have tried to shift the focus somewhat towards ‘doing good together’, that is towards acting collectively rather than just individually. Should effective altruists then also become more political and, more specifically, become egalitarians? In my talk, I investigate whether a commitment to reducing suffering and increasing wellbeing commits effective altruists to being egalitarians. To do so, I start by discussing different forms of egalitarianism and will then survey empirical evidence on the effects of inequality. After surveying how inequality impacts important outcomes such as economic growth, health, life expectancy, wellbeing and so on, I will ask some more specific questions, including: can effective altruists care about domestic inequality in rich countries given that global inequality seems more pressing? Are there strategic reasons not to engage too much in politics? Finally, if effective altruists should be egalitarians, are there tractable interventions they should pursue? Overall, I will argue that there is a strong, purely consequentialist case to be concerned with socioeconomic inequality, both at the national and the international level. Yet those benefits are typically systematic and long-run, which makes it harder to measure them. Moreover, the case for attempting to address inequality should be weighed against concerns about tractability and the potentially polarising effects of engaging in politics.

(09.45H-10.30H)

Samuel Hughes “Effective Altruism and the Ethics of Apocalypse”

One recent focus of work on effective altruism has been on the ethics of apocalypse, with several writers arguing that an apocalypse would be so very bad that drastic sacrifices are justified in order to reduce its probability by even the slightest margin.  In this paper, I defend the surprising claim that, given some well-supported empirical claims together any of several mainstream ethical theories, the opposite would be true: at least one kind of apocalypse would actually be good, and it might sometimes be obligatory to try to bring it about, perhaps even at great cost.  The empirical claims are that there are exponentially more animals than humans, that substantial numbers of them are affectively sentient, that their lives tend to be highly unpleasant, and that none of these claims are likely to become false in the foreseeable future.  It follows that an apocalypse in which all affectively sentient life was destroyed would result in a huge reduction in suffering against a comparatively small loss in pleasure.  Whether this leads to an obligation to bring about such an apocalypse, if one is so able, depends on one’s background ethical theory; some ethical views, like Kant’s, probably avoid this conclusion.  I argue however that the range of views that entail an obligation to cause this kind of apocalypse is surprisingly wide, encompassing most of the views that contemporary effective altruists tend to endorse.  I conclude by reflecting on what effective altruists and others should make of this fact.

(11.00H-11.45H)

Teruji Thomas: “Must Tiny Chances Count?”

We might, and plausibly do, have tiny chances of making evaluatively enormous differences. On the usual way of thinking, these tiny-chance differences can be decisive as to what we ought to do, or what it would be rational for us to do.  I'll assess a variety of arguments that this need not be so. Some of these arguments are driven primarily by intuitions about cases; others by the difficulty of decision theory with an unbounded utility function; and others by the observation that outright belief does not require certainty.

(11.45H-12.30H)

Stefan Riedener,:"Effective Altruism under Moral Uncertainty"

What ought you to do if you are uncertain about which moral theory is correct? One prominent answer to this question is that you ought to maximise the expected choice-worthiness of your actions – analogously to what standard decision theory says you ought to do if you are uncertain about the empirical facts. However, this answer presupposes that we can compare the strength of our moral reasons across different theories – i.e., that we can make sense of statements like ‘our reasons not to lie, according to Kantianism, are stronger than our reasons not to punch someone, according to utilitarianism’. Many people have doubted that such intertheoretic comparisons are meaningful. I shall suggest a proposal about how to make sense of them. On this proposal, we can understand intertheoretic comparisons simply in terms of facts about what you ought to do under moral uncertainty. We can have a meaningful debate about the latter, even without presupposing dubious metaphysics, and so we can regard some intertheoretic comparisons as reasonable. I end by briefly considering the implications of this proposal for our moral reasons to ‘do the most good’ in the ways in which effective altruists typically try to do so. I shall suggest that on this proposal, much more than on others, you ought to give weight to these reasons even if you antecedently find it implausible that they exist.

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